“Hello, Madoff!”

Eleanor Squillari, Bernard Madoff’s longtime secretary, on the Staten Island Ferry. Right, Madoff at the 2003 Christmas party for his company’s London office. Photograph by Stephen Wilkes (Squillari).

For more than two decades, Bernard Madoff’s secretary sat just outside his office. She knew his clients and his feeders, his moods, habits, and indiscretions. She saw both sides of his wife, Ruth. Until December 11, 2008, she trusted him as a generous, caring boss. Now, in an exclusive collaboration with Mark Seal, Eleanor Squillari describes the madness surrounding Madoff’s arrest—meticulously planned, she believes, by him—her role in helping the feds, and the mysteries of the 17th floor, two levels down, where his massive Ponzi scheme was perpetrated.

From 1942 to 1945, Adolf Hitler employed a young secretary named Traudl Junge. She took dictation from him, handled his correspondence, even typed his last will and testament, and was inside the bunker in Berlin the day he shot and killed himself. Yet despite their close proximity, Junge later claimed that she had rarely heard Hitler utter the word “Jew” and had learned about the Holocaust only after her boss was dead and the war was over. She suffered enormous guilt, she said, over having once actually liked “the greatest criminal ever to have lived.”

In writing about Bernard Madoff for Vanity Fair’s April issue, I frequently heard his victims refer to him as another Hitler, who decimated his largely Jewish clientele by stealing their money in the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. The night the magazine shipped to the printer, my cell phone rang. “This is Eleanor Squillari,” the caller said in a heavy New York accent. “You left me a message a couple of weeks ago. As you can imagine, I’ve been pretty busy.” She paused, then added, “I was Bernie Madoff’s secretary.”

A few days later, in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I met this smart, attractive, gutsy Italian-American, who for 25 years had sat right outside Madoff’s office. Like Traudl Junge, Squillari insisted that in all that time she had had no idea what lay beneath her boss’s affable, if frequently peculiar, façade, or what transpired on the 17th floor of the Lipstick Building—two floors below her office—where $65 billion in investors’ funds disappeared. Unlike Hitler’s secretary, who spent years trying to distance herself from the Nazi war crimes, Eleanor has spent nearly every moment since her boss’s arrest, on December 11 of last year, trying to help bring about justice.

She was still working with the F.B.I. in the emptied-out offices of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities L.L.C. when she decided to write this story with me. Exposing the truth was the least Eleanor felt compelled to do for the thousands of individuals Madoff had robbed of their money and their future. Since the story is all Eleanor’s, we have cast it in her voice.